Overview
Minimap2 is a fast sequence alignment program designed for aligning DNA or mRNA sequences against a reference database. It excels at handling long, noisy reads generated by PacBio or Oxford Nanopore sequencing technologies, as well as short reads from Illumina platforms. The tool uses minimizers to index the reference genome, enabling efficient identification of potential alignment locations. It supports various alignment modes, including genomic read mapping, splice-aware alignment for RNA-seq data, assembly-to-assembly alignment, and finding overlaps between long reads. Minimap2's speed and accuracy make it suitable for large-scale genomic analyses, assembly polishing, and comparative genomics, providing biologically meaningful alignments ready for downstream analyses.
Common tasks